Scientists claim breakthrough in antimatter hunt - Yahoo! News

Scientists claim breakthrough in antimatter hunt - Yahoo! News: "GENEVA – Scientists claimed a breakthrough Thursday in solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, successfully trapping the first 'anti-atom' in a quest to understand what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang.

An international team of physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to create an atom of anti-hydrogen and then hold onto it for long enough to demonstrate that it can be studied in the lab.

'For us it's a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,' the team's spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, told The Associated Press.

'This field is 20 years old and has been making incremental progress toward exactly this all along the way,' he added. 'We really think that this was the most difficult step.'

For decades, researchers have puzzled over why antimatter seems to have disappeared from the universe.

Theory posits that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. But while matter — defined as having mass and taking up space — went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has all but disappeared except in the lab."